AN ECONOMIC SURVEY OF ANCIENT ROME
Volume iv, Part I: RomanAfrica, by R. M. Haywood '26. TheJohns Hopkins Press, 1938.
This monumental work is probably the most important and significant of its kind ever envisaged in practical form. The survey embraces the entire Roman world through the middle of the fourth century A.D. and is made available to modern economists by the addition of English translations of all sources quoted. Under the editorial direction of Professor Frank, of Johns Hopkins, and with the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, four large volumes have now appeared, with a fifth and last volume still to come. As one of the nine international collaborators (English, French, German, Italian, and American), Dr. Haywood has contributed the survey of Roman Africa.
The series aims to present the relevant economic facts which are offered not only by the literary sources, but in such recent abundance by archaeology, epigraphy, and papyrology; and to avoid theorizing, to shun the allurements of economic determinism and aprioristic habits of thought in historical interpretation. In Haywood's study this twofold aim is everywhere attained: the economic picture is as complete as existing data permit, and no procrustean bed has stretched or mutilated it.
The author's plan divides the five centuries of Roman Africa into three chronological sections and discusses under each such topics as natural products, industry, commerce, labor, wealth, property, and population. An Ariadne's thread of political history guides the reader through the economic mazes.
The history of Roman Africa began with the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. After the abortive attempts of the Gracchi to plant colonies, Marius, Caesar, Augustus, and others met with such success that Africa enjoyed its highest prosperity in the second century A.D. and Carthage became one of the mighty cities of the empire. What are today the French, Spanish, and Italian possessions bordering the Mediterranean, at that time contained literally "scores of cities of perhaps three to ten thousand population which were solidly prosperous and furnished with a surprising number of the amenities of life." The reviewer recalls his astonishment on his first visit to the African ruins, in spite of previous preparation, at the number, extent, and evident prosperity of the ancient cities. It is of this Africa that Haywood portrays the economic life.
He has formed his mosaic from a thousand particles, diligently sought, faithfully collected, and skillfully combined. No source available in modern monograph of classical savant or chance hint in ancient lyric poet has been left unexploited. We are given the pertinent details of cereal and olive culture and their variations in extent and locality; the facts about the production and trade in wine, figs, flax, livestock, shellfish for the famous purple dyes, apes, elephants, wild beasts for the games in Rome, citrus wood for table tops (Cicero paid half a million sesterces for one), coral, sponges, pearls, ostrich eggs and plumes, cloth, lamps, pottery, marble from the quarries, African slave boys, etc.; the particulars of commerce with its articles of export and import, its ports and routes; the conditions of labor, slave and free, and of the guilds; the problems of finance, money, prices, and the distribution of wealth; the salient points on property, the large imperial estates, and the tenant farmers; the racial composition of the population, its dispersion, and its economic life in country and town. These items and many others comprise the picture which is altogether convincing and complete.
If one expects to find an imaginative Ferrero-like amplification of these elements into a brilliant modernization and distortion of history he will be disappointed. The author leaves such theorizing to others. He has produced a sober, scholarly, objective study which, from the standpoint of our present knowledge of the ancient world, can unhesitatingly be call definitive.
